When terrorists set off bombs at the Boston Marathon in April, Jihad Elias Georges of Charlton had to turn away from the news coverage.

"I could not watch," he said. "I turned it off. I lived (through) it in Lebanon. If you want to do that, kill yourself, go in the woods and kill yourself."

He does not think people should be killing one another. As a Catholic who goes to Mass every Sunday, he views killing as wrong.

But his strong beliefs, including his conviction that suicide is a sin, just make it more difficult for his neighbors to understand why he spread gasoline around his second-floor apartment, ignited a piece of paper on his stove and attempted to take his own life by burning the building on June 30 in Charlton.

He told police he did it because his name is making it hard for him to find work. A police report indicates that investigators didn't believe him.

Days after his arrest on a charge of arson, clad in an orange prison orange jump suit with Velcro that fails to close over his chest, he thinks his reason for wanting to die came after years and years of dealing with what might termed bullying.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and again after the Marathon bombing, people looked at him differently. Some called him a terrorist. He applied for jobs — he's an auto body repairman who paints cars — but when potential bosses saw his name, they never called him back, he said.

He goes out to eat alone, never drinks more than one beer and lives a solitary life. He has few, if any friends. He likes Johnny Cash and blurts out, "Walk the Line. He sings a very true thing: Son leave your guns at home."

Recently, he said, he was on a "tryout" for a car painting job but he did not seem confident that he was going to keep the position.

Many people have wondered why he didn't just change his name. The neighbors who lived beside him at the apartment on Mugget Hill Road said he went by "Jay."

But he said he was told that only citizens can use the courts to change their names.

"I wanted it to be George Georges," he said, adding that his mother, who named him Jihad so he would fit in among the Muslims in his community, though his family was Catholic, would approve.

Now he is awaiting his next court date but it is not to change his name. He was charged with arson when he returned to the apartment building as firefighters were working to contain the three-alarm blaze Sunday night. He was arrested and eventually confessed.

"I only was thinking of myself. I do not know why," he said. "Of course I am sorry. I did not want to hurt anybody."

But a spoken apology delivered secondhand does little to comfort his neighbors, who were driven from their homes at 10:30 p.m. Sunday as fire raged inside Mr. Georges' apartment. The man living next door to Mr. Georges roused his neighbors and they raced outside second after Mr. Georges drove away in his truck. He said the fire blew him out the door, but neighbors don't believe that.

"I'm angry," Laurena Brown said. "Just the fact that there were four children in the building. And there's a lady in one of the other apartments that's pregnant. He could have killed us all."

She's been spending time throwing away items from her apartment beneath the one Mr. Georges' once lived in. Personal and sentimental things that cannot be saved are being discarded like trash.

Her daughter, Erin Brown, said her 9-year-old daughter doesn't want to sleep in their apartment even though she wasn't home when the fire broke out. Ms. Brown said she and her fiancé, Richard Remillard, have spent many sleepless nights tossing and turning in fear.

Worse, though, is that Mrs. Brown's granddaughter, who's 3 years old, cannot run back and forth between her family's apartment and her grandmother's next door. Broken glass litters the yard, and her grandmother now stays elsewhere.

"I don't know if I can ever come back," Mrs. Brown said.

Mr. Georges, talking from the library at the Worcester County Jail and House of Correction in West Boylston, said he did not think about the possibility of others being hurt when he started the fire. He had just wanted to have a normal life, become a US citizen, work a job, maybe have a family, but he was losing sight of those dreams.

"I love this country," he said, adding that he's been in America for 14 years. "I'm doing good here. I'm living check to check. I don't bother nobody."

While he has tried to become a citizen, he said, he's twice been turned down and he believes it's because of his name.

"I go there and there are people, I think they speak Spanish, they take test, do the writing and they become citizen," he said. "Me, twice I go they not make me citizen. I want to be citizen."

On his right arm is a tattoo of an American Flag with an eagle across it and the letters "USA" beneath. A tiger, which is what he said he was known as back home in Lebanon, and a tribute to his homeland, are emblazoned on his left arm.

There is a chance, even though he was once married to an American woman who divorced him some time ago, that he could be sent back to Lebanon because of what he's done.

"If they say I go back, I go back," he said. "I don't want to, I love it here, but if they say, I must."

The patriotic tattoo, he admits, will be a problem if that happens.

"I will have to start over," he said. "I will start over."

Contact Kim Ring at kring@telegram.com. Follow her on Twitter @kimmring

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